The deepest and most enduring thirst common to us all is the desire for love and happiness. You and I spend a great part of our lives struggling towa… - Michael Elmore-Meegan

Because of the distrust that has grown from our experience, we are very careful whom we welcome. We are selective in our companions, we look suspiciously those who sit beside us in a bar and start talking to us: “is he crazy? What’s he up to?” we wonder. The city becomes a desert. With groups of friends who are nobody else’s friends. As Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet, once wrote: “The soul selects its own society, then shuts the door.”

People can't eat our pity, dehydrated children can't drink our sorrow nor can a child be educated by our anger at injustice. No one has ever been lifted out of poverty by us being overwhelmed or shocked. The only thing that ends poverty is our actions.

Even if we were offered everything that exists, it is nothing compared to the freedom and power of being loved